Because in spite of ‘lockdown’, people just mass congregated at walmart and other ‘open’ stores every day. Bored? Plop the family in the car and everybody go to walmart and troll the electronics department with 100 of your best friends and neighbors.
Just moved the spreading from the barber shops, beauty parlors and sitdown restaurants to the electronics department at walmart.
The day after ‘we’ locked down, the closest walmart was completely packed, parking lot completely full, cars parked on the side of the road up and down. More crowded than black Friday has ever been. Entire families going shopping. Including the grandparents. Masses of people loitering about outside the store in giant gaggles of disease transmission. Because with nowhere ELSE left to go and walmart on the list of ‘essential’ stores, that’s what went for entertainment.
Result? Walmart will have a stellar quarter. The little mom/pop shops that were closed? probably out of business. The virus? not slowed down one bit, just changed lanes from transmission avenues A to transmission avenues B.
Overall result? People conclude the lockdowns didn’t work.
My favorite model (the first Imperial College model—https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf) anticipated significant “leakage” even under a “shutdown” scenario.
“Leakage” is not all bad—it means that the virus spreads through the population, but at a manageable rate (from the point of view of hospitalization rates).
The whole “shutdown”, “no shutdown” debate is a major oversimplification in my view.
“Shutdown” states like my CT have a lot of leakage and economic activity going on—”non shutdown” states still ban large crowds, have social distancing, and now have many folks using care (including masks at this point).
One of my big disappointments with most Freepers is that they cannot seem to understand the complexities of what is actually going on past the headlines.
“Result? Walmart will have a stellar quarter. The little mom/pop shops that were closed”
Yep.
But the masks will change that. We already are avoiding going there because of the hideous masks, and will do other things, like riding. From 4 to 2, 2 to 1 per month.